Pages

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Global imbalances, the renminbi, and poor-country growth

Global imbalances, the renminbi, and poor-country growth

Helmut Reisen, 1 November 2010

The debate over global imbalances has a sharp focus on China.
But this column says the debate is missing a crucial point: that China’s
growth has been good for poor countries, so that a renminbi
appreciation slowing Chinese growth will also hurt many other poor
economies.

Discussions on
how best to move towards a more balanced world economy have frequently
ignored how proposals to redress these imbalances will impact poor
countries. Highly publicised global imbalances in the current accounts
of the balance of payments – embodied in deepening US current account
deficits since the mid-1990s and sizable Chinese foreign exchange
reserve accumulation since the early 2000s – have drawn much attention
to the question of renminbi misalignment. A rapid appreciation of the
renminbi would involve substantial risks not only for China’s growth but
also for global and poor-country growth.

Many studies purport
to measure the degree of renminbi undervaluation using various
theoretical constructs, but most have ignored the exchange-rate
implications of the fact that China is still a poor country. The
Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) effect can be used to explain the real
exchange rate by a country’s relative productivity level. Figure 1 shows
percentage deviations of the renminbi from the cross-country regression
line from 1990 to 2007, using two PPP (purchasing power parity)
concepts, based on International Comparison Program (ICP) and Penn World
Tables (PWT) data. Regardless from the measure, the degree of implied
undervaluation has increased since the early 2000s. Until China loosened
its dollar peg in June 2010, there had been a recent accentuation in
the degree of undervaluation, largely driven by China’s superior GDP
growth.

Figure 1. China: HBS-implied misalignment, 1990 to 2007

Percentage deviation of market rate from PPP rate

Source: Garroway, Hacibedel, Reisen and Turkisch, 2010

Renminbi appreciation and China’s growth

Stellar growth
performance in China has been accompanied by a stable path of real
exchange rates. Large fluctuations of real effective exchange rates can
undermine incentives to invest in non-traditional sectors (Williamson
2000). Figure 2, which relates the PPP estimate of the real exchange
rate (US = 1) to the logarithm of the corresponding countries’ per
capita GDP, shows a striking association between exchange-rate stability
and income convergence. Figure 2 suggests that sustained growth
benefits from an exchange rate that is not only competitive but also
stable. The smooth real exchange rate path in high-growth China and
India contrasts with the experiences of Brazil, Indonesia, and South
Africa, where income convergence has been slower over the last two
decades.

Figure 2. Individual adjustment paths between 1990 and 2008

Source: Garroway et al. 2010

The
Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson framework predicts that the renminbi is bound
to appreciate in inflation-adjusted trade-weighted terms as long as
China grows faster than the advanced countries. It is hard to forecast
the effects of renminbi appreciation on China’s future growth rate. Much
will depend on the scale and speed of currency appreciation, the
counterfactual growth effects of policy status quo of pegging the
renminbi to the US dollar, and whether the real appreciation occurs
through nominal appreciation or through positive inflation differentials
with trade partners. But development economists should nevertheless be
concerned about a potential slowdown triggered by currency appreciation,
not least because China has contributed to global growth in general and
to poor-country growth in particular in the 2000s

China is still well
described by a dualistic framework that assumes a large subsistence
agricultural sector containing surplus labour existing side-by-side with
a growing and dynamic capitalist, urban tradables sector characterised
by rising productivity. In the absence of perfect financial markets, a
competitive exchange rate is a powerful policy instrument to incentivise
resources (including subsistence labour) to move from low- to
high-productivity sectors.

China, the new locomotive for low-income country growth

The effects of
China’s growth on other countries may be positive or negative depending
on the similarity of their trade patterns. There has been concern among
some developing countries (with labour-intensive industries) that
China’s growth was having a detrimental effect on their terms of trade,
while exporters of oil and industrial metals would benefit in the short
term (but might suffer from resource-curse effects over longer periods).

Similar to Levy-Yeyati’s (2009)
analysis for emerging countries, Garroway et al. (2010) analyse the
impact of China’s growth on a broader group of poor countries. We
estimate the relationship between China’s growth rate and those of 122
developing and emerging countries for the period between 1990 and 2009.
The 1990s represent a highly volatile period particularly for the
emerging and developing economies with several financial crises, while
the 2000s can be considered a more tranquil period for the developing
countries with enhanced integration of the global economy, a rising
profile of China in the world economy (with WTO membership since 2001),
and high global liquidity.

My co-authors and I
analyse China’s impact on long-run growth of developing economies in a
fixed-effects panel that uses real GDP growth rates. Two interaction
terms are included as explanatory variables in order to capture the
impact of OECD growth and China’s growth in the second period.
Developing countries are grouped by exports into oil- and non
oil-exporters to explore how the changes in growth association differ
across these two groups. This permits us to explore whether China’s rise
as the new engine of growth was driven solely by the commodity linkage.
Our main findings are:

1.
The impact of China’s growth on both the low- and middle-income
countries has grown significantly in the 2000s. So a slowdown of one
percentage point in China’s annual growth rate would reduce low-income
countries growth rates by 0.56 and middle-income growth rates by 0.36
percentage points.

2.
The impact of OECD countries has significantly decreased over the same
period for the low-income countries, with a coefficient close to zero,
while it remained positive (0.3 percentage points) for middle-income
countries.

3.
The results for the non-oil developing economies show that the China
impact is not limited to oil exporting developing countries, it is also a
robust finding for non-oil countries. Consequently, China’s
strengthening engine role for poor countries does not seem merely driven
by the oil-exports channel.

China’s rapid growth
and the attendant demand for other countries’ goods have had positive
spillover effects to poor countries. Still, higher tradable goods
production in China results in lower traded goods production elsewhere
in the developing world – entailing a growth cost for these countries.
Are these the poor countries, as suggested by Subramanian (2010)?
The empirical evidence points to contrary conclusions. The exports of
China were mainly concentrated on labour-intensive products in the early
1990s but since then a growing proportion of exports has become more
capital- and skill-intensive. Technological upgrading in China has moved
China’s price impact from the developing countries to the high-income
economies (Robertson and Xu 2010). The real effective exchange rate of
the renminbi has exerted no significant pressure on the export prices of
low-income countries since the late 1990s (Fu et al. 2010).

Why are these new growth linkages important in the context of renminbi evaluation?

Rodrik (2008)
reports panel regressions that suggest that the partial correlation
between his index of (log) undervaluation and an economy’s annual growth
rate is 0.026 for developing countries in general. A recent IMF study
(Berg and Miao 2010) confirms Rodrik’s analysis by producing, with a
dataset based on 181 country observations during eleven five-year
periods from 1950-54 to 2000-04, empirical evidence that not only are
currency overvaluations bad for growth but that undervaluations are also
good for developing-country growth.

Moreover, Rodrik
(2008) presents evidence that growth in large‚ dual economies such as
China and India is especially supported by a competitive exchange rate.
In the case of China, his estimate rises to 0.086, a much bigger number
that he attributes to the large reservoir of surplus labour and the huge
gap in the productivity levels of modern and traditional parts of the
economy. This estimate implies that a 10% appreciation would reduce
China’s growth by 0.86 percentage points.

By extension, a
large Chinese appreciation would also imply a relative currency
devaluation in other developing countries. The implied transfer of
exportable production from China to other poor countries would mean
lower global growth as it represents a transfer to countries that are
less efficient to translate currency undervaluation into high growth. To
be sure, these concerns ignore adjustment and substitution effects, but
they serve to illuminate potentially high adjustment cost that a
renminbi appreciation might entail for the world’s poor outside China,
an aspect entirely neglected in current macroeconomic policy debates.